How to handle coach/recruiting situation as a parent

JHS
Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:42:16 +0000

There’s a real flaw in the OP’s thinking that has been bothering me since I read this yesterday.

I completely get – and agree with – the parents’ desire to see their daughter get the greatest value possible from her athletic talent. But I think their analysis of value is way too simplistic. There are three characters in their story: “Major Ivy”, “Academically Elite But Not An Ivy”, and “Good Regional Private”. The parents feel that a degree from MI is worth more than one from AEBNAI (and implicitly a lot more than a degree from GRP), and therefore that their daughter should not pick AEBNAI – otherwise her first choice – unless it is less expensive than MI.

Now, “academically elite but not an Ivy” can cover a pretty wide spectrum of colleges, from Stanford and Duke to, say, Tulane, USC, Notre Dame. At one end of the spectrum, the one with Stanford and Duke, not to mention MIT, the parents are just being silly if they think that there is a meaningful value difference versus whatever “major Ivy” is recruiting their daughter. If that’s what the OP is talking about, someone should just tell her that she is wrong. If, however, as I assume to be the case, AEBNAI is not Stanford or Duke but maybe something like Vanderbilt or Northwestern or Michigan, the OP may in fact be correct that, on average, or at the median, a degree from MI would have more value than one from AEBNAI. But the problem is that hardly any kids are AT the average or on the median, and their kid isn’t likely to be, either. And if you drew a Venn diagram with the “values” of the degrees from the two colleges, there would be just an enormous common area, with MI maybe having a little extra at the top of the spectrum and AEBNAI a little extra at the bottom, a difference that probably reflects nothing more than their modest difference in selectivity, not anything that the colleges actually do. For the vast, vast majority of students, how valuable their degree is will depend much less on which college they choose than on what they do when they get there.

A kid who loves where she is going, and who fits well with her team and coach, is likely to have a better experience, and to do better, and therefore to get more value from her education, than one who, albeit at an arguably better college, is less enthusiastic, less engaged, and less comfortable. The last thing any parent wants is to drop a ton of money on a bad college experience with a marginal GPA, even if the degree is fancy. The OP should pay close attention to why AEBNAI is her daughter’s first choice, and should think twice and thrice before counseling her daughter to reject it because it costs as much or almost as much as a college the daughter likes less.